News of the Week

Disgraced stem cell scientist Woo Suk Hwang was handed a 2-year suspended prison sentence on 26 October for embezzlement and bioethics law violations. And the scientific community seemed to just shrug.

Three days after President Barack Obama told a Massachusetts Institute of Technology audience that he would lead the country into a "new frontier" of clean energy research, a fledgling federal agency made a $151 million down payment on that promise.

Since researchers announced on 24 September that an AIDS vaccine trial had positive results for the first time in history, the debate over whether the results were real has largely given way to intense discussions about how to build on this surprising finding.

ScienceNOW reported this week on gene therapy that helps blind children see, why naked mole rats don't get cancer, why fish and red wine don't mix, and how to cut carbon emissions one house at a time, among other stories.

A new study finds little evidence for leaks in the U.S. pipeline for producing native-born scientists except for a steep drop in the percentage of the highest performing students taking science and engineering jobs.

Confident that its opinions will be welcomed by the Obama Administration, the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) has launched a study of how best to improve U.S. science education.

A fresh find of human fossils claimed to be more than 100,000 years old challenges the prevailing view that our ancestors peopled the world in a migration out of Africa late in the last Ice Age, Chinese scientists say.

ScienceInsider broke the story this week that the Department of Energy may extend by 1 year the operations of Fermilab's Tevatron. Other highlights include the final report of the blue-ribbon panel on the future of U.S. human space exploration, which suggested, as expected, that NASA should extend shuttle launches into 2011.